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Beyond bones & stonesMon, 05 Dec 2016 13:10:41 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/aac6e480eb087b41a5008c996dd0a464?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngAnthropology.nethttps://anthropology.net
The Oldest Humans, Aboriginal Australianshttps://anthropology.net/2016/09/23/the-oldest-humans-aboriginal-australians/
https://anthropology.net/2016/09/23/the-oldest-humans-aboriginal-australians/#commentsSat, 24 Sep 2016 01:26:42 +0000http://anthropology.net/?p=6211Continue reading →]]>A genetic and cultural analysis, published in Nature, of 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from New Guinea suggests there was just one wave of humans out of Africa, 72,000 years ago. These these early migrants gave rise to all contemporary non-Africans, including indigenous Australians and Papuans. This group descended directly from the first people to inhabit the continent some 50,000 years ago. That makes them world’s longest running civilization.

Manjinder Sandhu, a senior author from the Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge, stated,

“Our results suggest that, rather than having left in a separate wave, most of the genomes of Papuans and Aboriginal Australians can be traced back to a single ‘Out of Africa’ event which led to modern worldwide populations. There may have been other migrations, but the evidence so far points to one exit event.”

The ancestoral split from this pioneering group around 58,000 years ago as these prehistoric Australians and Papuans continued to make their eastward journey. “Sahul”—a prehistoric supercontinent that connected Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania was occupied around 8,000 years later, and the rising sea levels isolated them off from the rest of the world about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been there ever since.

There are several other intriguing findings of this study. For starters, the authors uncovered genetic evidence that points to the existence of an unknown human species, possibly Denisovans, that interbred with anatomically modern humans as they migrated through Africa. The researchers also presented new perspectives on how Aboriginal culture itself developed. An internal migration happened some 4,000 years ago, explaining the presence of younger languages and the emergence of new stone technologies in the archaeological record.

So what does our man Ötzi sound like? It’s a rough, gravelly kind of male voice, reminiscent to some of a chain smoker. Mind you, they still need to incorporate the effects of soft tissues in the mouth and throat, as well as the tension and density of the vocal cords, to get a more accurate reconstruction. but have a listen here:

When Hinson saw that his ancestral Chickasaw language was disappearing, he decided to help build an online presence and create a smartphone app to make the language accessible. Ryan Red Corn (Osage)

Hinson used the internet to build an online presence for his tribe. This has been done before, as recently as in 2012 when Google embraced the Endangered Languages Project. Hinson almost a poured a decade into the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, and by now knows enough Chickasaw to hold conversations as well as to read and write. As I understand it, at 32 years old, he is youngest member of the language to speak fluently, the next youngest member is 62.

He’s taken took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience, creeating the Android and iOS apps as well as Chickasaw.TV. Besides teaching the alphabet, essential words and phrases, and methods for constructing a sentence, theses sources also contains recordings of native speakers to model pronunciation and cadence.

Tribal leaders supported his motives, which was launched in 2009, but Hinson had no idea if it would translate into more people learning the language. But it was a hit, even his son among other young people began showing more interest in learning to speak Chickasaw, they sparked their parents’ interest too! This is not the first example of using the internet and technology to save dying languages. The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages—a nonprofit that connects linguists with Indigenous language speakers and activists in order to save endangered languages—has created multimedia toolkits to allow people to use video, audio, and other technologies to preserve their languag

Filed under: Blog, Cultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology Tagged: chickasaw, Endangered language, endangered languages, language, Linguistic Anthropology, linguistics, speech technology]]>https://anthropology.net/2016/09/19/using-technology-to-save-endangered-languages/feed/101-joshua-hinson-chickasaw-nation-1050x588kambizWhen Hinson saw that his ancestral Chickasaw language was disappearing, he decided to help build an online presence and create a smartphone app to make the language accessible. Ryan Red Corn (Osage)The Resilience of The Awá Against Modernityhttps://anthropology.net/2016/09/12/the-resilience-of-the-awa-against-modernity/
Tue, 13 Sep 2016 01:16:21 +0000http://anthropology.net/?p=6121Continue reading →]]>Over at the Washington Post, there’s an interesting article documenting how two Amazonian Awá tribeswomen have escaped the modern life after being forced out of their traditional life styles. The Awá are one of many endangered tribes, threatened out of existence due to deforestation and modernization. Theye estimated to be about 450 people who now mostly live on reservations the southeastern edge of the Amazon. But an unknown number of members live as hunter-gatherers.

The story starts,

“In December 2014, three “non-contacted” [people were] led out of the forest they had lived in their whole lives and taken to a village.”

Jakarewãja and Amakaria, two women from endangered Awá tribe from the Brazilian Amazon, pictured while sick with tuberculosis after being led out of the forest in this 2015 photo. (Courtesy of Survival International)

Jakarewãja and Amakaria are the two escapees. They contracted tuberculosis, unsurprisingly. They complained about the number of non-indigenous visitors they recieve. They complained about the food and medicine they were given by government health workers. They complained about the the heat under the tin-roofed metal hut they were forced into.

The story ends,

“A year and a half later, in an extraordinary twist, the two women have escaped back to the forest — taking just an ax, a machete and their pet birds. They left clothes they had been wearing strewn on a path — and their escape left a very clear message.

We don’t want your civilization. Instead, we choose our ancient way of life.”

Filed under: Blog, Cultural Anthropology Tagged: amazon, arawak, Cultural Anthropology, culture]]>braz-awa-ss-2015-01-crop_originalkambizJakarewãja and Amakaria, two women from endangered Awá tribe from the Brazilian Amazon, pictured while sick with tuberculosis after being led out of the forest in this 2015 photo. (Courtesy of Survival International)Did Lucy Fall From A Tree And Die?https://anthropology.net/2016/09/06/did-lucy-fall-from-a-tree-and-die/
https://anthropology.net/2016/09/06/did-lucy-fall-from-a-tree-and-die/#commentsTue, 06 Sep 2016 20:17:05 +0000http://anthropology.net/?p=6068Continue reading →]]>Four decades after the discovery of Lucy, her remains are quite possibly the most famous discovery in paleoanthropology and one of the more important. The impact of finding a nearly entire skeleton from a 3.2 million year old hominid revealed a lot about human evolution. We’ve learned a lot from Lucy, from biophysics to the geological environment she lived in. Up until recently, however, her cause of death was unknown to us, until now.

John Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, with 3-D printouts of Lucy’s skeleton. Credit Marsha Miller/University of Texas at Austin

Almost 10 years ago, Lucy went on tour. While at the University of Texas at Austin, a team put her through a CT scanner and conducted a sort of forensic and paleontologic experiment. Their findings were published in Nature, last week. The team discovered she sustained a compressive fracture, which was confirmed by consulting multiple orthopedists. Lead author, Kappelman, looked at the remainder of the skeleton and found more compressive fractures along with greenstick fractures. The scientists concluded that she came down feet-first and then tumbled forward, holding out her hands in a futile hope of protecting herself. The fractures to her rib cage suggest crushing injuries to her internal organs that would have killed her.

An image from a video animation depicting a hypothetical scenario for Lucy’s fall out of a tree. Credit Valerie Lopez/John Kappelman

Dr. Kappelman and his colleagues hypothesize that Lucy must have fallen from a tree because geologists have determined about the environment where she lived, at the time, was a low-lying wooded area around a stream, with no cliffs nearby. While this is certainly a plausible scenario, many paleoanthropologists are skpetical. Some of the most vocal critics, like Ericka N. L’Abbé, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and even Dr. Johanson, the man who discovered Lucy, state the fractures could have occured post mortem, not perimortem. In order to truly identify if these fractures happened after death, microscopic evaluation of the fossils would be needed to done.

One of the most important features of Lucy was per bipedal stature, especially her lower extremities and her pelvic girdle. But she still was a tree climber. Last monnth’s discussion in Nature finding considers the possibility that Lucy fell out of a nest in which she was sleeping, like Chimpanzees, or while she was climbing for food.

If you have a 3D printer, you can jump on over to eLucy.org, to download the renderings and even print out casts of Lucy’s bones on 3-D printers.

Filed under: Blog, Physical Anthropology Tagged: australopithecus afarensis, forensic anthropology, human evolution, lucy, orthopedics, paleoanthropology, Physical Anthropology]]>https://anthropology.net/2016/09/06/did-lucy-fall-from-a-tree-and-die/feed/230zimmerweb1-superjumbokambizJohn Kappelman, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, with 3-D printouts of Lucy’s skeleton. Credit Marsha Miller/University of Texas at AustinAn image from a video animation depicting a hypothetical scenario for Lucy’s fall out of a tree. Credit Valerie Lopez/John KappelmanNo, Neanderthals Didn’t Give Us Schizophreniahttps://anthropology.net/2016/08/18/no-neanderthals-didnt-give-us-schizophrenia/
https://anthropology.net/2016/08/18/no-neanderthals-didnt-give-us-schizophrenia/#commentsThu, 18 Aug 2016 23:44:53 +0000http://anthropology.net/?p=6034Continue reading →]]>Thanks to twin studies, schizophrenia is one of the few mental illnesses that we know have a genetic inheritance pattern. Schizophrenia often presents as a inability to separate reality from non-reality, where patients often experience hallucinations and stimuli that do not exist, such as hearing voices. Just how this deleterious disease came about to be part of our otherwise social story has been an evolutionary condundrum.

A new, while negative finding, study in Biological Psychiatry may help explain that Neanderthal’s, in particular, can’t be faulted for this mental illness. By doing a GWA of genomes of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution. From that, they looked at regions of the human genome associated with schizophrenia, known as risk loci. They, then, found that these loci were more likely to be found in regions that diverge away from the Neanderthal genome. This means schizophrenia is a modern development, one that emerged after humans diverged from Neanderthals.

We already know that the Neanderthal introgression has brought a higher than average risk of diabetes, and an overall altered immune system. But it seems that that Neanderthals, at least, did not suffer from schizophrenia and that this mental illness is perhaps newer.

A cancerous foot bone belonging to a 1.7 million year old hominid. (Image: Edward J. Odes et al., 2016)

The first is an osteosarcoma, a type of agressive malignant bone tumor, found on a 1.7 million year old hominid, SK 7923, from the cave site Swartkrans in South Africa. Osteosarcomas affect young individuals. They have little to do with environmental influences. Since it is a metatarsal, its hard to known exactly what species it came from, what we do know is that it did come from a hominid.

Tumors found on the vertebra of an Australopithecus sediba specimen are shown in pink. (Image: P. S. Randolph-Quinney et al., 2016)

In a related paper published in the same journal, a collaborating team of scientists describe the oldest tumor ever found in the human fossil record—a benign tumor found in the vertebrae of an Australopithecus sediba child.
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Prior to this discovery, the oldest known hominin tumor was found in the rib of a Neanderthal dating back to around 120,000 years ago.

Neanderthal remains from Troisième Caverne in Goyet, Belgium have cut marks that imply they were butchered and processed for consumption similar to remains of reindeer and horse from the same site. With most of the bone fragments are from the tibia and femur bones, the researchers hypothesized those were consumed for their higher in meat and marrow content. These remains date to approx. 40,000 BCE. Some of these bones were even made into tools to retouch flint. Other possible evidence of cannibalism among Neanderthals had previously been found in Spain and France, but this is the first find for Northern Europe. The results of these findings were published in Nature, last week.

“A Story Of Us” Podcast from the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University

She and her colleagues have creatged a new podcast called, “A Story of Us,” where they discuss current topics in anthropology as well as OSU’s Anthropology Department research. They hope to bring anthropology to both anthropologists and non-anthropologists. Like this website, Anthropology.net, their goal is to ultimately increase public understanding of anthropology. This season will be focused on Migration.

A pile of hundreds of broken stalagmite pieces found deep inside Bruniquel cave, France were made by humans from about 176,000 years ago. The ancient structures are actually made of more than 400 pieces of stalagmites, located about 300 meters from the cave’s entrance. All the stones are similarly sized, piled up, and arranged in two circles. The researchers also found signs of fire on the structures, as well as burned bone fragments. By analyzing the stalagmites as well as the calcite that grew on top of them, the researchers were able to date the site to about 176,500 years ago. At that time, only Neanderthals lived in Europe.

The findings were published earlier this week in Nature and indicate Neanderthals were creating complex structures way before modern humans arrived in Europe. The only other known remnants of Neanderthal constructions are disputed and they date no later than 50,000 years ago.

This week’s study, shows that Neanderthals built structures so complex that they resemble those made by modern humans. This evidence adds to the theory that Neanderthals were very intelligent and supplement that their behaviors weren’t that far off from modern modern humans. For example, we already knew before they performed symbolic burials, made beautiful cave art and made musical instruments. For individuals to create structures like the ones in the Bruniquel cave they had to have to have some sort of lighting apparatus inside a pitch dark cave, it also required forethought, it required planning and organization so that you can actually do that, like break the stalagmites and erect the structures.

These structures could represent some kind of symbolic or ritual behaviors, but we won’t really know, but what is interesting is that Neanderthals had enough social capacity to be making these amazing structures nearly 175,000 years ago. Isn’t that remarkable?